“To succeed with the green shift, there needs to be a sustainable plan to secure long term availability for all the alternatives fuel for ship owners to understand how to best invest in future fuels solutions.”

— Thorbjørn Hareide

In the last cluster catch-up, HYEX Safety shared their view on hydrogen from a safety perspective, and with an increase of projects they recently employed a new person to the team. Now it’s Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime’s turn!

Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime’ mission is to create complete hydrogen-based Power Systems for ships. The system consists of a LOHC release unit that through an endothermic reaction will release hydrogen from LOHC oil and provide it to a fuel cell that generates electricity available for the ship. We had a chat with Thorbjørn Hareide, Business Development Manager, to get to know more about their daily life.

What is Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime’s primary focus right now?

We are working on getting the word out here in Norway on the perks of handling hydrogen as an oil with Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC).

An important part of this is to realise our two projects HyNjord and Ship-Ah2oy. HyNjord is partially funded by Enova and is our pilot and technology demonstration that started in 2021 and will start testing on-board Edda Ferd in end of 2024.

With this project we will put an 100kW LOHC Power System on deck of Edda Ferd to demonstrate our LOHC Release Unit on-demand feeding H2 to a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) providing electricity to the ship. Then in February this year we launched our second project Ship-Ah2oy funded by EU Horizon 2020. The goal is to build a 1MW LOHC power system solution and to install it on Edda Breeze to act as the main power unit on the ship. So very exciting times for us now in going from power point to real projects and to end up with a commercial solution for shipping.

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime in the future?

One challenge we see ahead is the availability for alternative fuels including hydrogen to the maritime industry. To succeed with the green shift, there needs to a sustainable plan to secure long term availability for all the alternatives fuel for ship owners to understand how to best invest in future fuels solutions. Another challenge we face is the lack of rules and regulation for future fuels. Today the reference for all alternative fuels is the IMO IGF code and LNG rule set. In our opinion it is important that both Class Societies and Flagg states take lead and develop regulations that fit the different fuel solutions. Our LOHC solution based on Benzyl toluene has a high flash point, and is liquid state at ambient pressure and temperature, and therefore not comparable to LNG.

Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime are in the very favourable situation that Østensjø and Edda Wind has already taken the leap and invested in building ships prepared for our LOHC Power System including necessary onboard fuel tanks. This creates an opportunity for us to provide multiple systems to an already existing fleet of vessels.

How can hydrogen be a part of the solution for the future?

To have access to abundant amounts of green hydrogen will be the key solution to get the total CO2 emission down both for industry on land and sea. For the alternative fuels green hydrogen is incremental to achieve an actual zero-emission. Further to that, we believe hydrogen as a fuel with LOHC is the best zero-emission solution to shipping. LOHC makes hydrogen safe and easy to both transport and store in large quantities, both on-board and land by utilizing existing MGO infrastructure.

What is your primary focus when it comes to sustainability?

With the LOHC Power System we can use on-board transfer system and existing bunkering infrastructure for refuelling the ships. We believe this is critical in creating a sustainable future fuel solution that will not require massive investments to plan and build new infrastructure for transport, storage, and bunkering. Another part of our sustainable focus is to make the total efficiency of LOHC cycle as high as possible by allowing for several hundred uses of the same oil and building a LOHC power system that will try and utilize as much of the waste heat as possible.

Why did you decide on becoming a member of Ocean Hyway Cluster?

We think it is important to recognize that there are no silver bullets in the path to zero-emissions for the maritime industry. Thus, it is even more important that the different parties come together to work towards the goal of getting as close as possible to net zero. We believe that actual change only can be achieved through collaboration and Ocean Hyway Cluster is an important arena to achieve this goal.

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Cluster catch-up: Hydrogenious LOHC Maritime

“To succeed with the green shift, there needs to a sustainable plan to secure long term availability for all the alternatives fuel for ship owners to understand how to best invest in future fuels solutions”.

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